*** Charmian Clift (1923-1969) was a noted Australian author of novels, short stories and travel memoirs, best known and loved for the hundreds of essays she wrote for her weekly column in the Sydney Morning Herald in the period 1966-69. Clift and her husband, journalist, war correspondent and novelist George Johnston, spent ten years living and writing in Greece (1954-1964) on the islands of Kalymnos and Hydra. ***
Although Charmian Clift was born one year after my mother, in 1923, her life had very little in common with my mother's. And although I was therefore of a different generation, born the year after Charmian and her husband, George Johnston, were awarded first place in the Sydney Morning Herald Literary Competitions for their collaborative novel, High Valley, the course of my life has been influenced in personal and professional ways by the life and art of Charmian Clift. That is to say, had I not read her Greek memoirs and fiction, I doubt that I would have been inspired to spend ten years in Greece, and, even though my own attempts at writing pre-dated the reading of Clift's work, to me she was always a literary exemplar as well, differences of genre notwithstanding.
My belated pilgrimage to her childhood haunts in and around the town of Kiama, on the Illawarra coast of New South Wales, was therefore charged with many associations, although I was also prepared for the possibility that everything might well have changed beyond recognition since Charmian Clift lived there.
The extent to which landscape, or, more broadly speaking, place, shapes and conditions consciousness varies from one individual to another. In my own case, having grown up on a coastal farm, I am in no doubt as to the magnitude of the role landscape played in illumining the way I perceived the world, both physically and metaphysically. It never occurred to me to regard landscape as not being imbued with spirit. Nobody told me it was, but nor did anybody close to me ever claim that it wasn't, so I grew up believing that my physical environment, which happened to be endowed with great natural beauty, was also my spiritual home. I also tend to believe that if you have never loved your own landscape, you may find it difficult to love others, whereas if you love and appreciate your formative environment, this may predispose you to respond in a similar way to subsequent environments, and to understand, or share, or relate to other people's love for their places of origin.
While not discounting the dynamic role of factors such as heredity, family, upbringing, education, friends and community attitudes in shaping individual consciousness, the landscapes or places that elicit a sense of love and loyalty, affinity, belonging, can be, in ways that almost elude language, evocative of the person whose earliest sense of identity is inextricably linked with them.
Recurrent images of the Clifts' cottage and nearby Bombo Beach in Charmian's later writings evince her awareness of how indelible the traces of childhood places can be, and the ways in which, having provided the imagination's primary vocabulary, they can continue to nourish creativity. This symbiosis of imagination with environment was one of the qualities that first attracted me to Clift's work:
When I was a little girl I would often star-bake at night in the confident expectation of finally turning silver, and star-baking I would look up into blazing majesty and I would sometimes feel that I might fall off the turning earth and into the sky, falling very slowly, falling away to something else entirely. [Feeling Slightly Tilted]
In excerpts from various interviews broadcast on ABC radio, Clift spoke of her childhood at Kiama in terms that suggest it was a paradise apart, rather than paradise central:
I had a very happy childhood in that particular way Australian country kids do, I think particularly kids who live by the sea, in that we were very poor, but we never felt poor, because we had the beach. I suppose it was my nursery, and my playground too, and I was lucky in that I had parents who loved books, who loved music. The only thing was that we were very separate, quite alien in a way, and I think that stayed with me all my life, in that we didn't have… cousins and grandmothers and all the usual paraphernalia of people who have been born into a community where their ancestors have lived for a long time…I think I've always been on the outside looking in… [ABC Radio National, Verbatim, broadcast 11/11/2000]
Charmian Clift's deep sense of intimacy with her childhood landscapes seems to have influenced the ways in which she related to and formed attachments to other places, most notably the islands of Kalymnos and Hydra, which became leading characters in her book-length memoirs, Mermaid Singing and Peel Me a Lotus respectively, but the same kind of responsiveness and sensitivity to a locale and its residents also informs essays such as "The Wreck of the Traute Sano", in which the Cornish landscape and sea around Land's End is a protagonist as vivid as its human characters. It seems to me that from her earliest years Clift learned to read landscape as she learned to read books and people, becoming a finely-tuned and highly articulate reader of geomorphic "text".
In an essay, The Long Hot Days of Summer, she cites Hippocrates' treatise of circa 2,500 years ago, Airs, Waters, and Places ("a prototype study in bioclimatology") endorsing its premise that these environmental factors do indeed play a vital role in mediating all forms of life and human cultural patterns, ending with a speculation about climate change which now, forty years on, is becoming an inescapable reality:
Whatever happened to those long hot Australian summers that I remembered so well for all those years, when my mother would sit on the verandah behind the fuchsia bushes (hosed down for coolness), and my brother and I, amazed at such lethargy, would race for the burning sands and the cold clean depths of the sea, and rejoice in the sun day after day and week after week, living and growing in it as in our natural element.[The Long Hot Days of Summer]
The essay as a whole is a typical example of the scope and sweep of Clift's concerns. Being vitally interested in phenomena of every conceivable kind, she is adept at relating the local to the global and vice versa, ranging through fascinating apercus and thought-provoking snippets of information from all manner of times, places and cultures, before narrowing the focus down to a single precise image of, say, a dripping tap in Mosman. By nature she clearly had an inquiring mind, but this quality was presumably enhanced by the freedom she enjoyed as a child to explore her environment, a circumstance replicated in her children's upbringing on the islands of Kalymnos and Hydra.
It is evident from early publications, such as the novels High Valley and The Sponge Divers, that the relationship between people and place is an essential one in Clift's world view. When one compares the collaborative works, High Valley and The Sponge Divers, with later "solo" works by George Johnston and Charmian Clift, there is a perceptible difference in attitude and the calibre of perception, not only in relation to people but also to place. In both respects, Clift's work has a quality of warmth and engagement with her characters and their environment that Johnston's lacks. This, too, perhaps, is as much a legacy of her Kiama childhood as it is an expression of her gregarious nature.
While landscape is not static, but vitally alive, the most dynamic and mercurial phenomenon associated with place is weather. In her essay, Winter Solstice, Clift acknowledges the impact on her psyche of growing up with the ocean and Bombo Beach at her door:
Isn't it strange how your childhood dogs you and tracks you and will not let you be?
Because of mine I have always loved weather. All sorts of weather. In a way, the worse the better. I vibrate in a storm like a tuning fork, and long for beaches, long, wave-lashed beaches, gulls, splinters, spars, dripping weed, squeaking sand, the fury of the sea roaring up the cliffs and sobbing down in impotence, and a creek breaking its banks to make a playground for wild, wet children. [Winter Solstice]
This passage suggests that the metaphor of reading does not fully accommodate Clift's response to her natural environment. Here, she attunes herself to the storm as an instrument is tuned for a concert, the metaphor of the tuning fork suggesting her perfect pitch in relation to the elemental. Her sensory perception of and receptivity to the nuances of her surroundings was instinctual, intuitive, as well as being a skill, an almost divinatory sense developed through intimacy with place.
The heightened awareness of her environment that characterises much of Clift's work has to me an Antaean quality, not to be confused with nostalgia. (Antaeus, son of Poseidon and Gaia, was, according to some accounts, invincible in wrestling as long as he remained in contact with his mother earth.) This is most apparent in works like Mermaid Singing, a memoir devoted to the Greek island of Kalymnos and its community of divers, whose world is dominated by the sea. (So perhaps in this case one should defer to Antaeus's paternal lineage, Poseidon.)
Clift's feeling for the sea was visceral, passionate, poetic: an attitude inspired by years of braving the rips off Bombo Beach. She was attracted to places in their most physically and spiritually challenging incarnations, and tended to valorise such people as the Kalymnian sponge-divers, who risked their lives to work in hazardous natural environments:
The sea… is an integral part of all Kalymnian ceremony. It is the ritual washing place for the sheets of the bridal couch, the sheets of the lying-in bed, the oil-and wine-soaked wrappings of the baptised child, the sheets from the bed of the dead. First fruits and last are offered to the sea… I know of no Kalymnian song that does not in some way make reference to the…sea…They are songs filled with sadness, with winds and darkness and months of waiting, with lonely nights and young girls wearing black. I have seldom known anything more poignant than to hear them sung, deep and soft and sad, by a dozen jerseyed men who know what the songs mean and unselfconsciously invest each phrase with this private inward knowledge. Then the sea moves into the songs, surges in, the dark impetuous rush of it, its passion and poetry and loneliness, its cruelty and tenderness, and the men's own bitter thraldom to this oldest of mistresses. [Mermaid Singing]
* * *
Seeing Bombo Beach for the first time was not a totally unmediated experience, since I had already seen it many times, and in all weathers, through the eyes and words of Charmian Clift. So there was a kind of double vision at work, in addition to the unexpected echoes of my own childhood spent in the vicinity of a Queensland coastal township, and my personal memories of Greece, which included several sojourns on Kalymnos.
It was only from the vantage point of a flat rock up near Bombo Head that the competing images began to compose themselves into some kind of perspective, albeit still layered and fragmented. As Clift once wrote, "…experience is so unique, and nothing, nothing in the world can be imagined beforehand. Everything is made up of particulars." [Taking the Wrong Road]
Although I had tried to imagine Clift's childhood locale many times before my first visit in April 2006, it wasn't quite as I had pictured it, and yet it was strangely familiar in ways I hadn't anticipated.
On the one hand, there were echoes of the imagery and iconography absorbed by Clift's wide-eyed, avid child, drinking in the richness and variety of her surroundings, charting the terrain she and her siblings perceived both as vast and yet composed of minutely observed particulars. These were the primary impressions the adult Clift took obvious pleasure in recapturing, the linguistic and stylistic sweep of her essays ranging across all registers, while not exceeding the compass of her allotted eight hundred words.
On the other hand, here was the prototype of Clift's breathtaking yet precise evocations, which had continued to inspire and sustain her in so many ways; a wild, romantic shore since encroached on by a motorway and housing estates, but with the sea and the sand and the headland still at the threshold, little changed. Here were primary impressions of pristine autumn seawater, an indefinable colour in the noonday sun, neither turquoise nor sapphire nor cerulean nor emerald, but all of them; a sky stripped bare by cold air currents, an aura of serenity that seaside places have on winter weekdays. This atmosphere was familiar from the coastal town of my early years, as was the row of Norfolk Island pines picked out on the headland to the south, where the old white lighthouse stands. From Bombo Head the pines resembled vertical fish-skeletons, dark in silhouette, while Bombo, darkened from a distance by its shadow, was, on close inspection, multicoloured - the rock ranging through shades of plum to gamboge and sienna, henna.
Sitting on the high ridge leading up to Bombo Head was a little like being on the bridge of a ship riding at anchor. It was no wonder an impressionable child like Charmian Clift heard the call to adventure from there.
Bombo's steeply-shelving arc of salmon sand is still backed by dunes spiky with aloes, descendants of the ones Charmian and her brother Barre used to graffiti, but Bombo, while remaining risky for swimmers on account of its notorious rips, has become much more accessible these days, with numerous daily train services from Sydney and a new multi-lane highway passing just behind it. It has not lost its beauty so much as its air of seclusion. It is no longer the private preserve of the few.
Pheasant Point, separating Bombo from Kiama town at the southern end, has become a local millionaire's row, and there is a sign as you approach the lagoon where Spring Creek pools into wetland behind the dunes, announcing that Kiama is Australia's tidiest town. One can imagine it having been a trim and shipshape place even in Charmian's day, and the bluestone schoolhouse she attended still stands, looking for all the world like certain schoolhouses in mountain villages of mainland Greece, but without the witness of Clift's words, it is becoming difficult to imagine the shyer, wilder charm of yesteryear.
Clift the essayist remarked the passing of a rougher magic as early as 1966, in a piece called Time, Progress, and Christmas Holidays, where she mentions the free-campers who had once sought out the seclusion of Kiama's outlying beaches: "Only at night, if you were up on the hill roads, you saw their fires below, like little ragged chrysanthemums, scattered along the velvety dark coast…"
The Kiama of Clift's memory was a place "you had to be very unsophisticated, or very sophisticated indeed, to appreciate."
But then… there was the sea. And there were the beaches. Mile after mile of salmon sand looped and scalloped between the purple cliffs where the aloes grew and the cows stood like wooden toys among snowy drifts of Sweet Alice, contemplating the vast blue ocean. The farmers' fields ran right down to the dunes and the tussocky marram grass…
In those days there were beaches that no foot trod from one summer to the next, excepting perhaps for a man with a home-made fishing rod and an inarticulate yearning for the loneliness and the cleanliness of such places and the sound of the surf beating back from the hills… [Time, Progress, and Christmas Holidays].
In another essay, The Time of Your Life, Clift reflects on happiness: the way we isolate in retrospect the shining moments from their context, as the grain is threshed and winnowed from the husk, and notes that if we could experience such moments again in their entirety (warts and all, as it were), we would probably fail to recognise them. Memory transforms. So it is with place, apart from the inevitable changes time brings, for time changes the observer as well.
There is another aspect to the relationship between person and place, however, which is perhaps less vulnerable to the ravages of time and various kinds of tide, and that is the value system derived from the sum of a formative environment's parts, which must ineluctably include a sense of place.
Traditional Australian values are intrinsic to Clift's work, whether she is writing of women processing prawns at Karumba, in the Gulf of Carpentaria
[Karumba Observed], or men diving for sponge in the Aegean [Mermaid Singing], or the early Australian aviators [The Albatross Colony]. Reading the essays and, for that matter, the travel memoirs, it becomes apparent that Clift valued courage, the "true-blue", sincerity, independence of thought and spirit, justice and a fair go, beauty, truth, art and the arts, poetry, generosity, moral strength, purity, honour, loyalty, freedom, simplicity. Her readers - especially during the years 1964-1969, when her weekly column in the Sydney Morning Herald attracted a huge following - valued her intelligence and generosity of spirit, her wit and charm, her compendious store of knowledge which she was always eager to share, her openness to experience and her fearlessness in tackling difficult issues with sensitivity and insight, and her ability to make each reader feel special, as if she were writing for that person alone.
In the essay, On Becoming a Kangaroo, Clift relates her father's views on the topic of Australia retaining its independence from outside influence, be it British, American, or any other. Beginning with an anecdote about a schoolgirl bully who accused her of being "a bloody little Pommy", Clift recalls her father's righteous rage at such a taunt:
"You are not," he bellowed in his rich Derbyshire accent. You are not a bloody little Pom. Never you forget it…You are…you are…" and his huge fist groped to heaven for an identity tag. "You are a bloody little kangaroo!"
Towards the end of this essay, Clift remarks:
I suppose he would roar now about American investment [as opposed to British, in the Vietnam War era of the late 1960s] ruining the country, and pace around the house at night wondering and worrying why Australians could not be made to see what he saw so clearly, what had drawn him across the world to make his home and his life here and to make himself personal champion of Australian autonomy and independence. He saw hope here for people like him, he saw pride here, and individuality here, he saw something brave and good and boundlessly promising…
Romantic and idealistic as Clift's view of essential Australian values may have been, she eschewed the jingoistic, even when explicitly taking up the cudgels to defend what she believed in, whether against apathy and affluent complacency or more aggressive threats. There are many instances of this, and essays such as Dry Times on the Watershed; After the Hodmadods; Report from a Migrant, Three Years Later; On Trouble in Lotus Land; You've Got to be Quick; Victims of our Society; The Right of Dissent, and Pilgrimage to a Possibility are but a few examples. But the same themes are an implicit part of the moral and aesthetic consciousness that forms an integral thread in the fibre and timbre of all Clift's writings. Despite the diverse strands and sources of experience and knowledge from which she draws her material, there is a coherence to her world view, a sense of groundedness.
In perceiving a clear connection between where Clift comes from and where she is coming from in her writing, I am tempted to draw on observations made about another artist, in another context, which I find apposite also in the present case. In the introduction to a book on William Robinson's paintings, Lou Klepac expresses his views as follows:
Poetical and philosophical ideas… are the purified essence of experience; they are spiritual revelations that are universal…
…
What is imagination? It is the process by which [man] transforms that which [he] discovers through experience into [his] inner existence. It is also the means by which such things can be shared and passed on. Imagination is the language of the spirit, the language of our inner self. It is how one soul communicates with another.
Each artist extracts from the world what [he] is.
It is the last remark that interests me most in relation to Charmian Clift. There are, perhaps not surprisingly, echoes of Kiama in Kalymnos, as Clift may have recognised at a subliminal level. We internalise those vital elements that we abstract from the world.
And now we are transformed. Our bodies, freed of their weight, float and flow in the greenish-gold, the goldish-green, the sun-dapple, the cavernous shadows. Our hair streams in the seashine, our bodies, following each other, are wet brown scrawls wavering over the weeds and the sand. We are forced to the sun-sparkling, dancing surface only by the gulping need of our gill-less bodies… to bathe in both elements at once - the warm air and the cold sea… There is a slow soft swell coming in from the southward, and we rock and rock under that great inverted bowl of blue. Surely it must tip a little to let us see what is on the other side, there at the sharp rim of things where the oyster gap between sea and sky opens up at dawn? The soaring stones of the old baked mountains peak and fall gently along miles of angled light and out of the world of perspective and rules… There is an albatross in the sky, and in my ears the low, exultant murmur of immense watery wheels turning…[Mermaid Singing]